Femina Nova
by Luna Plath
Summary: Nova: the mistaken sighting of a new star, a flash of brightness that quickly dims.  Ginny performs some unlucky magic and is forced to live with the consequences.  Harry/Ginny, Ginny/Tom.


_The themes in this story are not trying to sexualize rape; Ginny relives a past trauma and responds in a not unheard-of manner. The spell Ginny uses is based off of gypsy magic and not something of my own creation. A huge thanks to my beta J, who helped me iron out some of the less polished sections._

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><p><strong>Femina Nova<strong>

She was stretched out on her four-poster in her bra and school skirt, resting in the thick, musty heat that inched inside through the dormitory window. All of her classmates were in lessons or the common room, leaving her the sole occupant in the fifth-year girls' room. It was the third week of term, with homework and course material already underway, but her limbs felt so sated and zapped of energy that Ginny couldn't move to study if she tried.

A bead of sweat dipped between her breasts, salty and warm and indistinct, before soaking into her off-white cotton bra. She closed her eyes and listened to the dense, buzzing sound of the heavy afternoon until she caught sight of a shape emerging from the dormitory window.

Blinking at the change in light, Ginny peered at the dark-haired boy calmly sitting on the window seal, daring a gust of wind to pull him off the ledge to the far-away ground below.

"I thought you'd come," she said, looking him up and down with hungry eyes. His black hair was longer than she was used to seeing it; had he dodged her mother's annual school shearing? It reminded her of a memory she'd lost until now; a pale, older boy watching her from that very spot.

"You thought right," Harry said, his white school shirt pushed up at the elbows, showing off his summer-golden skin and the shapely plates of muscle and sinew that stretched beneath it.

Ginny rolled off the shadowed bed and waited for him to join her, her fingers seeking his once they were face-to-face.

"Come on then," she said, tugging him back to the unmade bed. "Let's not pretend."

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><p>It started during the summer after a bit of funny magic. A few months after her fourth year school shopping Ginny had found a crumpled piece of parchment in the pocket of her second-hand jumper with instructions for a love spell. It was written in girlish, loopy handwriting, like the kinds of notes her schoolmates would pass around to the other girls during History of Magic class, and the description seemed symbolic and oddly simple. Initially the idea of placing five roses in different places had sounded like folk magic, the kind of rubbish that muggles dreamed up in novels or gypsies charged for out of the back of a caravan.<p>

But things began to disintegrate as the year went on, and despite originally thinking it wasn't real spellwork, Ginny held on to the frayed square of paper. She thought about it more and more as her fourth year relationship with Michael came to an end. It called for simple, easily available ingredients, and the date of the casting was approaching. Midsummer served as a marker for many magical events, chipping away at her original belief that the spell wasn't legitimate.

Eventually Michael had left her for Cho, Sirius had died, and two of the girls in her dormitory had lost their virginity. With all the events of the past year pushing her forward, she went through with the spell during the long hours of oppressive summer heat, thinking about the differences between herself and the other girls in her year. Her mind kept returning to how it must have felt for them as inexperienced, unmarked women—something that she certainly wasn't. The longer she thought on, the tighter her chest felt, until a hard pit of anger formed after hours of bitter recollection.

Ginny had grown past her childhood insecurities toward boys, but thinking about virginity and sex and the _first boy_ that had ever looked at her in that way made her throat constrict. The last time a man had touched her between her legs she had been eleven years old, and no one had felt her there since. A part of her was both ashamed and terrified of what the next boy would say when he found that she wasn't a virgin, when she couldn't explain when or how it had happened. She'd considered lying about loosing it with Michael, but that idea had been ruined once he'd complained to the entire Ravenclaw quidditch team that she was "just talk" and wouldn't go further than snogging.

As June progressed with her return to the Burrow, the second-hand love spell caught her imagination again. It was enticing after the catastrophe that was her fourth year. _If he loves me it won't matter that Tom had me first_, Ginny thought, folding and unfolding the worn parchment until it began to fray, a plan forming in her mind.

It was a mad, reckless, stupid idea, but with the war starting to slowly infiltrate her life it was exactly the kind of thing that made perfect sense.

_And if it doesn't work no one will be the wiser_, she reckoned, plucking five red, long-stemmed roses from her mother's garden and slipping the last one under her pillow for three evenings. On the final night she turned on her side and slipped her hand in her knickers, thinking of long fingers and cool, soft lips. It had been so long since she'd been with Tom, and she had never been the patient type.

* * *

><p>Harry was crouched over her hips with his unruly hair tickling her lower stomach, his index finger hooked on the side of her knickers, inching them beneath her waist. His touch grazed a deliberate path over her skin, teasing her and making her tense with wanting while he mouthed a pattern against her hip.<p>

Ginny could feel her body quivering in response to the lightest contact from his lips—a pinprick of heat starting at her inner thigh and traveling straight to her groin, a sharp current of desire pooling in her belly as he kissed the baby-soft skin along her thighs—and it took more self-control than she thought she possessed to keep herself from reaching down and angling him in herself. The pressure that was building in the hollow between her legs made her unconsciously arch toward him, groping for the kind of firm, living pressure that she usually tried to simulate with her fingers.

She reached for his warm hand, guiding it over her center and pressing the heel against her downy curls.

"Be patient," he said, shimmying up her body and kissing the underside of her breast, fingers teasing the edges of her folds. "It'll be better that way, I promise."

An antsy, unsatisfied part of her wanted to say _And how would you know?_—but she held her tongue, wriggling underneath him in search of that elusive feeling he'd conjured in her over the summer.

After Ginny had cast the Midsummer love spell she had started running into Harry all the time—when she was hanging up the wash to dry, as she was coming down from the attic, just after taking a bath—and each time if felt like something physically hung between them, like an extra weight had settled into the room. The Harry she'd known last summer had been almost shy around her, but somewhere between Sirius's death and her Midsummer spell, he had changed. The Harry she'd known would never have pressed her against an apple tree and slipped his hand in her shirt and kissed her to keep her quiet, but she found herself fantasizing about each day's events as she lay in bed at night with her windows open to the summer breeze.

They had been circling each other for months now, and without her mother or Hermione or her brothers around to interfere it felt like the right time to move in for the final act. After ages of reliving her memories of Michael Corner's awkward groping and Tom's possessive hold on her little-girl body, it was time to reach out and grasp what she'd been hunting all this time.

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><p>With her hand clutched in Harry's, she followed him to the seventh floor of the castle. It was sundown, just the time when the rest of the school would be leaving the Great Hall and heading up to their respective common rooms, and after making an appearance at dinner the pair were ready to disappear for the evening. Side by side, they passed the tapestry of Barnabus the Barmy three times, waiting as the door finally appeared in the stonework.<p>

As he led her inside, the searing touch of his hand on her lower back caused a pressure to start at the base of her spine, slowly crawling upwards as Ginny shut the door behind her. With her pulse ringing in her eardrums and her body loose and soft against his firmer touch, she let herself be led over to the bed that the Room of Requirement had conjured.

Harry pressed her into the sheets with his full weight, rubbing his smooth palms underneath her woolen school skirt, over her legs, inside her knickers. She let out a soft, quiet moan against his neck, shivering at the feeling of his cold hands against her skin as he deliberately removed the last of her innocence.

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><p>Ginny shivered and rolled over in bed, her naked back and shoulders covered with gooseflesh. Sometime during the night she must have moved away from Harry because she remembered the warm, enveloped feeling of sleeping tucked against him—a sharp contrast to the prickling coolness she felt now.<p>

Opening her sleep-dilated eyes to the dark room, she saw his shock of black hair, his lips lightly parted in sleep. She reached out and brushed her fingers over his cheek, pausing when his skin felt abnormally cool to the touch. The air around her began to feel positively _still_, and a creeping uneasiness came over her as she sat up in bed and studied him more closely. Crawling towards him, Ginny fearfully realized that Harry wasn't breathing. A stab of panic shot through her before she quieted the buzzing that had suddenly erupted inside her head.

She laid a hand over his chest, feeling for the strong push of his heart against her fingertips. When no vibration reached her, she pressed an ear to his lips, listening hard for any sign of breathing, any evidence of life. Just as she was placing her fingertips against the immobile vein in his neck in search of conformation, the sound of rustling fabric, of a living person readjusting themselves behind her, reached her ears.

Any hope that she was somehow mistaken or dreaming died in her throat at that sound. Like paralyzed prey waiting to be seized, Ginny tensed, every muscle in her body screaming with fear.

Slowly, she turned.

"Good evening, Ginevra."

Just as dark and handsome as the boy next to her, Tom rose from the straight-backed chair from which he'd been watching, his face a mask of controlled interest. He wore the white Oxford shirt and pressed trousers of a student, but he looked much older than an adolescent of sixteen. As he moved closer, Ginny could make out more about his appearance, spying his sharp cheekbones and full, pouted lips. The air between them was tense with magical activity, strained with the weight of it.

"Why are you here?" she asked, suddenly feeling vulnerable in her nakedness.

The sharp, predatory glint to his eyes raked over her and she squirmed underneath Tom's gaze, a frightened rabbit cornered by the big, bad wolf. His expression was dark and haughty but her body was beginning to respond despite her fear. A rush of heat streaked up her abdomen, curling in the lower pit of her stomach and making the muscles in her thighs contract.

"Should I not be asking you that question? It was by your magic that I arrived in this place," he said languidly, as if her inner panic couldn't possibly reach him.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, her protest sounding hollow in her own ears. The darkness of the room had taken on a living, indigo quality, swallowing them in its completeness.

"Really, Ginny, I didn't arrive here by force of will. It was that little spell you cast all those months ago—don't you remember? Haven't you noticed at least a little change in dear Harry since then?"

Her heart dropped to a pit in her stomach, the sound of each beating rush filling her eardrums. "No."

The look Tom wore gave her the impression that he was entertaining himself with a little private joke, his emotions just beyond her reach. "Well, if you think not then this surely can't be real, can it?"

"I want you to leave," she said, her heart fluttering against her ribcage like a frantic bird.

Before she could voice any dissent he was up and within inches of her, his cool fingers grazing her cheek. "Lets not play games, Ginny. I think you'll find that I'm a very sore looser."

Her body was practically quaking, small shivers of awareness tingling from where she could feel his hands on her, and she had a suspicion that it wasn't just from the cold.

"I don't understand how this happened," Ginny said. "I don't understand what you did to Harry."

The air between her body and Tom's had begun to take on a life of its own, holding a low, purring charge. He angled his head to the side, bringing his lips close enough to her neck to make her ache with anticipation.

"Your spell was for a lover's return," he said, gliding his fingertips over the dip between her hip and her waist, the flat plane of her stomach, the gentle curve of her breast. "You loved me once, and the strongest, most intact piece of me has been lying dormant in young Harry for years, weaker than his true identity but slowly growing stronger. All it took was your bit of magic to give me life again," Tom said, his hands reaching to cup her breasts, to claim her.

"_No_," she said, but Ginny let herself be handled like a rag doll as he shifted from teasing contact to harsh force.

"Foolish little witch," he cursed, crushing her against the bed with his weight. Tom arranged himself between her legs and ground his hips into her, pain dizzying the corners of her vision in colored bursts of light. His right hand pinched her nipple and twisted it while leaving raw bite marks along the angle of her jaw. Tom lowered his trousers with his long fingers, further escalating the panic that had started to overwhelm her.

Tears formed in her eyes, wet and hot and blurring her vision as he reached between her legs and felt inside. Ginny gasped and jerked her hips upward, ashamed of the insidious excitement she felt at his touch. Her features crumpled as Tom roughly slid into her, and she tried to ignore the cold, silent presence of Harry on the bed, revulsion and desire clattering through her spine.

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><p>She didn't go to lessons the next day, hiding behind her bed hangings with the sour, unwashed scent of her hair and a dull throbbing in her center. The sounds of the other girls going through their normal routine failed to reach her, and the slow warming of the castle under the midday sun left her feeling withered and extinguished.<p>

After laying in bed far past noon, Ginny disrobed and looked at herself in the pale afternoon light, running her fingers over the bite marks, the bruises. Her mind felt empty and full of dust, as if her life were a collection of memories locked away in neat, impenetrable boxes. Every stride and triumph she'd made since Tom and the Chamber of Secrets had been wiped clean, leaving her barren and paralyzed by the awfulness of it all.

_What a silly, stupid girl_, she echoed, curling her shoulders inward as she lay on her side. After a time, Hermione came to check on her, peaking her head in the doorway and asking if she was there. In lieu of responding she rolled over and clutched her bed sheets tighter over herself, sinking into the feeling of her warm sleep shirt. Hermione prodded a bit further, asking if she was ill, if she wanted to talk, if she wanted to come down to the common room and play chess. Her silence was taken as a no. Ginny held her breath, waiting for the sounds of Hermione's footsteps to fade away, relieved when her ears were met with nothing but blessed silence.

She pulled her hangings back and breathed in the darkening night air, enjoying the sting of the cool wind against her limbs. Rolling over, something in her breathing hitched while a gust of wind lapped at the open panes.

Easy, careful footsteps sounded on the floor, along with the silken drag of an invisibility cloak.

"Ginny."

She didn't move. The world became a separate place from the inside of her brain and she huddled against the side, watching from her invisible perch.

Harry sat down next to her on the bed, not quite touching her. "Hermione's worried about you. She says you're ill, that you won't talk to her or any of your roommates."

He placed his cool hand over hers. "Is something wrong?"

"No," she said, feeling as if another person was speaking for her. "I'm fine."

"You shouldn't play games like that," Harry said, lightly dragging his nail over her palm. The room began to spin and she squeezed her eyes shut.

"Yes, Tom. I'll come down in a minute."

"Good," he said, brushing her coppery hair out of her eyes with his long fingers. "You know how I don't like to wait."

**fin**


End file.
